The book requires js to fetch content

[Myslawek]

Now book website requires js to run in order to fetch the data. Previously it worked on plain html, so it was possible to view all the content with curl or lynx browser.

It would be nice get back the old behavior, which would enable users to get the content without running JS.

[chriskrycho]

Hmm, can you describe under what circumstances you’re seeing that limitation? I just launched the book in Safari, Firefox, and a Chromium-based browser with JavaScript entirely disabled, and it works just fine.

[Myslawek]

It seems like there are 2 htmls fetch. One is the main site (https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/), and the second one is the sidebar, which contains the actual content of the book (
https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/toc.html).

So the issue is not js, but maybe some new sidebar setup. It requires navigating to /toc.html in order to get the book content. Half year ago I believe there was only one html: all the content list on the left + currently selected chapter.

Since I opened the issue for "js fetching", the ticket with current topic seems to no longer be valid.

[chriskrycho]

Ah, I believe that’s related to some changes upstream in mdBook, particularly this one. Note that this dramatically improves performance on large books, and that in fact in the time since that landed and current version we’re using, the site actually works much better without JS (see the mdBook CHANGELOG for more details on that).

Net, closing this; you may want to follow up with mdBook as to whether/how things could work better in those browsers. Thanks!